My latest Archaeotea Podcast is now live. This is a conversation with pioneering industrial archaeologist Pat Bracegirdle (nee Miles). Born in Shropshire and surrounded by industrial heritage as a school girl in Coalbrookdale, she spent her professional career teaching Life Sciences in London. Pat was drawn back to Ironbridge in the 1960s when she introduced…
Ancoats on a dark, wet, late winter Manchester evening. The pavements glisten with the recent rain. Passers-by hurry head down to the latest fashionable bars and restaurants in the district, disappearing downstairs to vaulted, bare-bricked, dining areas. The line of the Rochdale Canal shimmers in the black night, the waters reflecting some of the lights…
The fourth item in our festive look at the archaeology and history of Trafford in 12 objects is our first metal piece: a Roman coin. In late 2013 a small bronze coin was handed into the STAG display centre by one of our members. It had come from the allotments off Winstanley Road close to…
The third item in our festive look at the archaeology and history of Trafford in 12 objects, is another stone artefact: a large grinding stone found in Warburton in the 1990s. Made from gritstone and roughly conical in shape with a smooth under side, it weighs around 2.6kg and is 290mm wide and stands 130mm…
The second item in our festive look at the archaeology and history of Trafford in 12 objects is a stone found in a garden off Westmorland Road in Urmston in the spring of 2018. Weighing 4.643Kg, and roughly 230mm long, 165mm wide and 80mm high, this broadly rectangular piece of rock has a worn, shiny…
The first item in this festive look at the archaeology and history of Trafford in 12 objects is one of the oldest stone tools from the area: a leaf-shaped arrowed from Timperley. This was excavated in 1996 on the site of Timperley Old Hall by the South Trafford Archaeological Group. 31mm by 47mm in size…
For my winter seasonal archaeology blog I’ve chosen to write about the archaeology of Trafford in 12 objects. Each day of Christmas there will be a new post that takes us chronologically from the Neolithic to the 20th century. As ever, this is a personal choice, but I’ve tried to reflect the different landscape forms…
On a dazzling summer’s day in mid-July, the heather buzzing with activity, the sun bathing anyone brave enough to be outside in sweat, and light so bright that it hurt the eyes, I finally reached one of the most spectacular and remote Roman sites in northern England: Hardknott Roman fort. The fort was built on…
Sometimes the smallest objects can lead you down some unexpected research paths, where the provenance (archaeology-speak for location and context) is as important, if not more so, than the object itself. This is often very true of ancient hoards rich in precious metals. It’s the information they contain and their location that are the most…
Between 2011 and 2015 a three stage archaeology project, funded by the Peel Group, was undertaken at the Worsley New Hall site in Salford. This project explored the hall, its gardens and its grounds. The New Hall was built for Francis Egerton, the first Earl of Ellesmere (1800-1857) between 1840 and 1845. Ellesmere…
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